The publications and other materials referred to herein by author and date are incorporated herein by reference, and are listed alphabetically by author in the appended bibliography.
This application relates in general to fluid samplers and, in particular, to the automated collection of stormwater-quality samples in a vertical profile.
Sediment is a pollutant in rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs that can destroy aquatic habitats and affect our drinking water and recreational activities such as swimming. Many of today's environmental policies are oriented towards controlling the quantity of sediment and sediment-associated constituents from not only large rural watersheds but also smaller urban drainage basins into receiving waters. These policies are based upon scientific research designed to characterize and quantify the presence of a suite of regulated contaminants. Proper characterization depends on the collection, processing, and analysis of accurate concentration data.
Autosamplers are widely used to collect stormwater-quality samples where the remoteness or inaccessibility of a study site precludes manual collection. Additionally, autosamplers can be programmed to acquire samples in an environment that is rapidly changing, such as is the case when sampling urban runoff. The collection of a representative stormwater-quality sample in urban runoff can be difficult due to large sources of variability, both temporal and spatial (Selbig and Bannerman, 2007; Horowitz, 1995). Use of automated stormwater-quality samplers has vastly improved the way water resources professionals collect samples in these environments. However, these automated pumping systems do not always collect a representative aliquot of the flow moving past the sample intake, resulting in biased concentration data (Smith, 2002; Fowler et al., 2009).